Terms of use

What you can expect from Xiangqi Master, and what we expect from you. Plain English, and short — this is a free site for playing a board game, not a financial service.

The short version

Play fair, do not abuse other people, and the site is yours to use for free. We run it as well as we can but cannot promise it will never break. Nothing here is a contract for a paid service, because there is no paid service.

Using the site

Everything on this site — playing, the lessons, the puzzles, the rules reference and the analysis board — is free, with no advertising. You do not need an account to play the computer or to read anything. An account adds a rating, saved games and progress tracking.

You must be old enough to consent to the processing of your own data where you live, or have a parent or guardian's permission. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 13.

Your account

You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for keeping your password to yourself. Tell us at query@xiangqimaster.com if you think someone else is using it.

Pick a username other people can see without wincing: it appears on the leaderboard and in every game you play. We may change a username that is impersonating someone, advertising something, or obscene.

You can close your account at any time from your account settings. Closing it removes your profile and username; games you have played remain in your opponents' histories, because they are their games too.

Fair play

This is the part that actually matters on a game site, so it is specific rather than vague:

• Do not use engine assistance in a game against a person. Playing the computer is a feature; consulting one while a human waits is cheating. Our analysis engine is the same engine that adjudicates our games, which is precisely why engine-matched play is detectable.
• Do not manipulate ratings — no arranged losses, no second accounts to farm points from, no abandoning games in progress to avoid a loss.
• Do not abuse people. Harassment, threats, and hate directed at anyone are grounds for immediate removal.
• Do not attack the service: no scraping at a rate that degrades it for others, no attempts to break authentication, no automated account creation.

Where we find cheating, we may adjust affected ratings, void the games, and suspend or close the account. We will say which of those we have done if you ask. Rating adjustments are recomputed from the stored games rather than applied by hand.

Content you post

You keep ownership of anything you write — messages, usernames, game annotations. By posting it you allow us to store and display it as part of running the site. We may remove content that breaks the fair-play rules above.

Our content

The written content of this site — the rules pages, guides, glossary and analysis — is published under CC BY 4.0. Quote it, adapt it, republish it, including commercially, provided you attribute Xiangqi Master and indicate any changes. The site's name and logo are not covered by that licence.

Xiangqi itself is a game in the public domain, roughly a thousand years old. Nobody owns the rules, including us.

Availability

The site is provided as it is. We do not guarantee it will be available, that games will never be interrupted, or that data will never be lost — it runs on a single server and is maintained by a small team. If a game is lost to a server restart, we are sorry; there is no compensation to offer for a free game of chess.

We may change or withdraw features. Where a change removes something you were relying on, we will try to say so in advance.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the site. Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury, or fraud — those cannot be excluded, and we are not trying to.

If you are a consumer, you keep every right the law of your country gives you. Nothing on this page takes those away.

Privacy

What is recorded, why, and how to opt out is set out in the privacy notice, which is the authority on the subject — if this page and that one ever disagree, that one is right.

Changes to these terms

We may update this page. The date below changes when we do, and a substantive change will be announced on the site rather than made quietly.

Contact

Questions, complaints and reports of cheating: query@xiangqimaster.com.